1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates to the field of Internet technologies for computer systems; specifically, it relates to a distributed web CGI architecture.
2. Description of the Related Art
User Interface through web browsers, such as Netscape® and Internet Explorer®, is becoming a standard for Client/Server applications. A Client/Server application typically performs three types of operations, including Application Logic, Presentation Logic, and Data Management Logic.
Application Logic represents the behavior of the system, Presentation Logic represents the User Interface of the system, and Data Management Logic represents the managing the data in a Database Management System, such as Relational DBMS or Object Oriented DBMS. A Web Browser can be used to perform the Presentation Logic of a Client/Server application. This can be done using HTML documents that are dynamically generated. These documents may contain HTML tags and JavaScript code that is read by the Browser to render Graphical User Interface. This type of interface may be referred to as a Web User Interface (“WUI”). A WUI consists of HTML tags, HTML form elements, and JavaScript code. All of these may reside in a HTML document.
A Common Gateway Interface (“CGI”) is a technique used to construct a WUI to an application. When a user invokes any operation in the WUI, the Web Browser sends the request to the Web Server, which in turn invokes CGI programs. The CGI programs perform the requested task, and send the result back the Web Server. The result is expressed in terms of HTML documents. The Web Server sends the dynamically-generated HTML documents to the Web Browser which, in turn, renders the WUI. In this process, the CGI program might need to access the DBMS to have the Data Management Logic performed.